"No. In the whole time since the Change, I've been with exactly two women, you and her-and with her, it was exactly once. Run the timing, alskling. That was in goddamned April of Year Zero. We weren't married. We weren't involved."
"That was because-"
"Yeah, I know. I was there when we came back and killed the Three Stooges from hell, right? But the fact remains that we weren't involved. Yes, if I'd been screwing around, you'd have a right to want to carve my liver out. But I haven't been; not by any reasonable definition. You're the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with."
"But little Rudi makes it a bit awkward, doesn't he?"
"Yes. Kids have a habit of doing that."
He tossed off the drink, considered getting another, and decided not to-he'd had relatives who tried to solve problems that way.
"But I can't exactly have him killed, now can I?"
Signe opened her mouth, closed it, then stalked to her clothes, pulled them on and walked to the hall doorway.
"Fixing things is your problem," she snapped, then slammed the door behind her.
Well, shit, Havel thought, looking after her. Guess I didn't grovel hard enough.
She'd be all right in a while.
I hope, he thought, with an unfamiliar hollow feeling under his breastbone.
Chapter Seven
Dun Juniper/Dun Fairfax Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 21st, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine
Carefully now, Dennis Martin Mackenzie told himself.
Even these days, it wasn't often he got a chance to carve a whole twenty-foot section of black walnut log in a mixture of low and high relief; he grinned, feeling himself drooling metaphorically as he prepared to take out another chip, savoring the strong, slightly oily-bitter scent of the cut wood.
This sucker would have been worth thousands before the Change, but I'm doing something better with it than turning it into veneer.
The trees weren't even native to Oregon, although they did well in the Willamette, like nearly everything else except tropical stuff. Juniper Mackenzie's great-uncle the banker had planted thousands of them in the cut-over Cascade foothills around his hunting cabin starting back around 1920, fancying himself a practitioner of scientific forestry and having the period's innocent calm about introducing alien species into an ecosystem. This one had been harvested a year before the Change, along with a lot of other mature timber, something Juniper had done as the only alternative to losing the land she'd inherited from him for back taxes. Then the timber company had gone belly-up and left the logs stacked to season while the lawyers sharpened their knives:
Dennis's stepson Terry stopped working on a prentice-piece clamped in a vise on a nearby bench and came to look. It was getting dark, and Dennis's workpiece was surrounded by lamps; the wall of the dun to the west meant that sunset came a few minutes early. The shadowless light was pretty good, but you had to be careful about judging depth. He took the gouge and laid the sharp V against a section, tapped with the wooden hammer:
Tock. A large chip flipped away to join those littering the gravel beneath the X-shaped wooden rests that held the great baulk of hardwood.
"And that's it for today," he said in satisfaction, caressing the dark wood with its dense hard grain, feeling the strength of it through his fingertips, the gloss it would take when it was oiled and polished and varnished just right, and set up with its twin:
"It's gonna look great, Dad," the twelve-year-old said. "Maybe even better than the gateposts here."
"As good, at least, if I do say so myself, Terry," Dennis said happily.
Even after nine years he was a little self-conscious about calling the boy son, although "blended" families like his were more common than not these days, given the accidents of survival in the Dying Time, and Terry hardly remembered his birth father. Certainly he had the love of the wood in him, and he wasn't half bad at leatherworking, either, which was Dennis's other trade, and had been his second hobby before the Change.
Terry was half Vietnamese, slender and fine-featured, and he made Dennis Martin Mackenzie feel almost as much of a hairy troll as his mother Sally's slight-boned prettiness did. She seldom talked about her first husband, who'd been working late at Hewlett-Packard in Portland that March seventeenth, and had simply never made it home.
She had the guts and sense to take Terry and get out of Dodge before things went absolutely to hell. She is one fine lady.
He smiled as he caressed the wood with a broad hand, callused from his work and scarred by the accidents inevitable when you used chisel and gouge, knife and awl and waxed thread. The dividing channels for the knotwork were finished, running in sinuous interlocking curves and angles up three-quarters of the log's smooth surface; that left rounding the serpents and the delicate work of putting in the scales. The interlacing patterns and gripping stylized beasts' mouths had their inspiration from the Book of Kells, but he'd made changes of his own-elongating the pattern, and changing the animals to coyotes and black bear:
With wood this beautiful, I'm almost sorry to do any inlay work. Just a little to pick out the mouths and eyes of the dragons and wolves. More up top, of course.
He touched the rougher wood at the log's end. That was where the face of the Goddess would go-and that was the real challenge for this piece of work. He'd spent nights and days thinking of it, while he worked on other things or just stood looking. Sutterdown wasn't using the Celtic pantheon to represent some aspect of the twin divinities of the Old Religion, the way most Mackenzies did. They wanted to be different:
Hmmmm. Yeah, the outer form is Aphrodite. But I want elements of all three Aspects here. Sally for the Mother-of-All this time. Eilir for the Maiden? Maybe Astrid, if I can get her to sit for it. Or Luanne Larsson, if I could get her over here for a couple of days. I like the way the bones of her face go-that Spanish-lndio-African-Anglo blend would be just right for the Goddess in this aspect "How much is Sutterdown paying you for this?"
He started out of his trance, suppressing a flash of irritation. "Hey, Chuck. Is it that time already?"
Chuck Barstow was in his brigandine and sword belt, with twin sprays of raven feathers on either side of his round bowl helmet for ceremonial swank; privately Dennis thought he was given to wearing headgear all the time because his sandy hair was getting real thin on top, and he wore his beard trimmed to a rakish point. He was also taller and younger than the woodworker-forty to his fifty-odd, lean whipcord and gristle to the other man's broad muscular hairiness.
He wasn't fat before the Change, Dennis thought, with a trace of satisfaction at his own waistline-not exactly narrow, but without the rolls of surplus tissue he'd worn there from his late twenties until the aftermath of the Change. But then, he was a gardener by trade, not a pub manager like me, and he did all that knightly SCA shit in his spare time, too.
"Yup. The Dun Fairfax people sent a horn-call up when the party went past and the road sentry relayed it. Sam's stopped off home there, by the way."
"Damn," Dennis said mildly. "I wanted to talk to him about the latest batch of cedar for the arrow-making shop before he got all caught up in farmwork. Oh, well, it ain't a long walk and Melissa's a hell of a good cook; I'll drop by tomorrow: no, that's Ostara, everyone'll be busy. Day or two after."
He brushed chips out of his beard and off his carpenter's apron, laying down his tools. Terry hurried to help put them away in the workshop that huddled against the inside of Dun Juniper's wall beside the family cabin. Dennis grinned: Terry was a good kid, if a little serious. He grinned wider as he put on a clean white shirt with biblike ruffle, tucked it into his kilt, wrapped his plaid and belted and pinned it, and arranged the flat Scots bonnet on his head with the tuft of coyote fur at the clasp.
He'd teased Juney for years before the Change about the way she put on the Celtic thing, however much it went with her style of music, and about how her coveners were always pulling some sort of myth out of the Irish twilight- of course he'd been a cowan then, an unbeliever, and hadn't understood the symbolism. Juniper Mackenzie might have been the one who told the band gathered at her cabin that to survive they would have to live like a clan, as it was in the old days-but he didn't think she had meant to be taken quite so literally. It had been Dennis who christened it the Clan Mackenzie, and started the kilt-wearing fashion when they salvaged that warehouseTfull of tartan blankets. He'd come up with a good deal else that caught on too, in the years since, and mostly she'd had to go along with it.